The paradox is striking: the very groups driving on-ground climate action are the ones least trusted to build climate innovation at scale. Women are shaping how land is farmed, which community practices endure, and how families adapt to a changing climate. Yet when the conversation shifts from conservation to climate tech and investment, women-led solutions are still perceived as higher risk. Something is badly broken in how we think about this.
The conversation about gender and climate tends to get stuck in the same groove: women are disproportionately impacted by climate change, therefore women need to be "included." This framing isn't wrong, but it's incomplete, and the gap between what it says and what it leaves out is where a lot of climate solutions quietly fail.
Take measurement. As Varna Sri Raman, founder of JanVayu.in, India's largest independent citizen air quality monitoring network, points out, most climate interventions are designed around outcomes that are legible to funders and policymakers: tons of COâ‚‚ reduced, hectares restored, kilowatt hours generated. What they miss is how women actually experience climate risk and how they adapt to it, because those adaptations tend to be incremental, informal, and embedded in care work. In the case of air quality, women in low-income urban settlements spend more time in and around the home, cooking with solid fuels, drying clothes, managing waste in unventilated spaces. The indoor-outdoor exposure gap is a gender gap. But air quality policy remains almost entirely oriented around outdoor ambient monitoring and vehicular emissions. The problem isn't a lack of data, exactly; it's that nobody decided women's exposure was worth measuring in the first place.
This is what Varna calls "building in blind spots from day one," designing livelihoods programmes, clean energy rollouts, and agricultural adaptation projects around a "household" as the decision-making unit, which in practice means assuming a male head of household. When adoption looks fine on paper but the technology doesn't fit women's workflows, schedules, or priorities, we call it a demand-side problem. It isn't. It's a design problem.
What makes this particularly striking is that some of the most enduring climate solutions have, in fact, been shaped by women, often quietly, and often far from the rooms where climate policy gets made. Terra.do Fellow Priya Srinivasan points to figures like Pappammal, the centenarian who championed organic farming, and Saalumarada Thimmakka from rural Karnataka, who over her lifetime created a forest and became known as the Mother of Trees. Matriarchs across India have long shaped how land is farmed and which practices a community adopts. Yet when the conversation shifts from conservation to climate tech and investment, women-led solutions are still perceived as higher risk. The paradox, as Priya notes, is striking: the very groups driving on-ground climate action are the ones least trusted to build climate innovation at scale.
Part of what makes this so persistent is that it's not just about who's in the room, it's about whose knowledge counts and who holds the budget. Grace Rooney, a Terra.do alumni, who works at the intersection of gender and climate, puts it plainly: gender shapes everything from who designs technologies, to whose knowledge counts, to who has access to resources, financing, land, energy, and decision-making power. Women show up in climate consultations, the gram sabha, the focus group, the validation workshop. But being present is not the same as shaping the agenda. As Varna frames it, until women are designing the measurement frameworks, deciding what counts as a successful outcome, and holding budgets, we'll keep producing climate solutions that work around women rather than for them.
The good news is that when women do hold that design power, something different tends to emerge. Kate Highfill, another alum, describes a mode of thinking she sees consistently in women-led climate work, one that doesn't just ask "what does it take to achieve X objective with results 1, 2, and 3," but also asks which voices have historically been left out, how this path affects future generations, and how to create opportunities that reach beyond the project's immediate goals. Rebecca Pan, an alumni puts it in stark contrast: when female voices are absent, you get war analogies, a move-fast-and-break-things mentality, and testosterone-fuelled competition. When they're present, you get more cooperation, more creativity, and, critically, solutions that scale at the pace of seasons, with a focus on common good rather than conquest.
This is also why coalition-building matters so much, and why Terra.do instructor and ecopsychologist, Nikyta Palmsiani has been gathering lists of organisations and groups that amplify women's voices in climate, including The Greenhouse, founded by a Terra.do alum, Anu Sanghvi which supports women entrepreneurs in the space. Collective action, as Nikyta notes, is where the impact actually is. And Trixie Ann Golberg adds that female perspectives are particularly well-suited to the long game: they tend to leverage collective action, generational thinking, and inclusive decision-making structures, exactly the qualities that durable climate solutions require.
None of this is about saying women are inherently better climate leaders. It's about recognising that the frameworks we've built, for measuring impact, allocating capital, designing technology, running consultations, have structural biases baked in, and those biases have costs. When we fix the measurement problem, we find the indoor exposure crisis. When we fund women-led solutions at the same rate as others, we unlock the innovations that grassroots climate action has already been proving for decades. When we stop treating participation as the goal and start treating co-design as the standard, we get solutions that actually fit the communities they're meant to serve.
The climate crisis isn't going to wait for us to catch up. And we can't afford to keep designing around half the planet.
Perspectives shared by Nikyta Palmsiani, Varna Sri Raman, Priya Srinivasan, Kate Highfill, Grace Rooney, Rebecca Pan, and Trixie Ann Golberg, all Fellows and alumni of the Terra.do community. Shoutout to Kathy Kwon for sharing that neat Insta reel too.